I wanted to dive further into the world of the far future that Cordwainer Smith had created – because each story had only revealed a part of a much larger whole, each self-contained but with enough hints of greater wonders that lay in store in Smith’s ‘weird and wonderful universe’. My favourite being The Ballad of Lost C’mell, with its fantastic opening line, ‘She was a girly girl and they were true men, lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won.’ By the time I finished the four short stories contained in that book, I was a Cordwainer Smith fan for life. It was to be one of the best discoveries of my reading life. It was 15 years ago, while rifling through the shelves of a second-hand bookstore – on to be exact – that I stumbled upon a much-read copy of a book called Space Lords by an author called Cordwainer Smith, with the description above jumping up at me in big bold letters from the back cover. Where living weapons guard the most important secret-the secret of immortality.Ī universe ruled by an omnipotent elite known to men as the Lords of the Instrumentality. Where men ‘built’ from animals labor for mankind-and plot in secret. Take a trip 40,000 years into the future to the weird and wonderful universe of Cordwainer Smith.Ī universe where giant planoforming ships ply the spacelanes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |